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This engaging biopic is a fact-based story of three students from poor backgrounds who grew up as "martial brothers" at a draconian Peking Opera Academy in Hong Kong in the 1960s and early '70s. (Kids get their education free in exchange for a period of indentured servitude as novelty performers.) For 12 years the lads stoically endure the harsh training, feeling as painfully out of step at the height of the swinging '60s as military school cadets. In the meantime the staunchly traditional Peking Opera style has fallen out of favor with the public; only old men show up for the boys' flamboyant shows. The youths finally graduate with prodigious skills that the society no longer has any use for. In real life the story had a happy ending: the three pals applied their hard-earned training to stunt work in martial arts movies, eventually evolving into the HK movie superstars Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao, who often appeared together in movies like Chan's exhilarating
Project A. The young actors who play the future stars are amazing simulacra for their adult counterparts, and Hung himself turns in a textured, complex portrayal of the school's harsh taskmaster, Sifu Yu. Cheng Pei-pei, the high-flying swordswoman in '60s King Hu flicks like
Come Drink with Me, is Sammo's love interest, a teacher at a nearby girl's school.
Painted Faces isn't gracefully constructed (it shifts focus from the students to their teacher halfway through), but it's neat to see where some of the defining characteristics of HK cinema came from: the showmanship and the risk-anything physicality.
--David Chute
